Sandwiched neatly between the RealTime is God and RealTime Who Needs It crowds is a new group that embraces both positions while moving forward rapidly. These folks include Brett Slatkin of the PubSubHubub effort and Dave Winer of rssCloud.org. Slatkin and fellow conspirator Brad Fitzpatrick demoed the PSHBB architecture at the RealTime Stream Crunchup, and Winer quickly jumped in with his own implementation.
While Winer attacked PSHBB as a Google (and TechCrunch) conspiracy, the rhetoric seemed mostly in service of his own plans for a decentralized open platform not controlled by bigcos. The charges don't make sense — PSHBB is not a Google effort but rather one started by Fitzpatrick and Slatkin on their own — and like Winer's, proposed and delivered as an open architecture that can be spread across multiple players. In other words, they're saying the same thing.
Digging deeper, it could be that Winer's concern is that adoption by Google or other platform players will create a bandwagon effect that could lock out smaller independent developers. There's certainly some truth to that dynamic, as PSHBB is already running in a number of cooperating platform implementations including FeedBurner, WordPress, and even FriendFeed, where Slatkin is active in tracking user issues. But ironically, by offering a competing framework, Winer takes away the argument of unfairness. If developers and publishers want to adopt one platform over another because it's got more mainstream adoption, they're free to do so. In the past, Winer has been the beneficiary of just such choices, with RSS 2.0 proliferating in no small part due to support from Microsoft on the platform side and the New York Times on the publishing side.
With the whole "direct to consumer" approach failing epically, Clarion has evidently resorted to pushing remaining inventory of its largely unwanted MiND mobile internet device onto Nissan dealers in Los Angeles. In all fairness, we do suspect that these are moving more briskly than, say, Celio's REDFLY, but we can count the amount of MIDs we've seen in public on two or three hands. At any rate, Nissan has signed on to offer the multifaceted Atom-powered device as an optional accessory in its Cube, but at least initially, it'll only be made available at select dealers in the LA area. For those opting to outfit their new whip with one of these, Nissan will include a dedicated docking kit harmonized to the vehicle's instrument panel, and the user interface will also be tweaked for in-car usage. Look -- this is absolutely better than those lackluster, overpriced NAV units shoved into most dashboards, but at $799 plus installation, it's not like you're getting the steal of the century here.
[Via Pocketables]
Filed under: Handhelds, Transportation
Clarion's MiND finds a home in LA-area Nissan Cubes originally appeared on Engadget on Sun, 26 Jul 2009 20:48:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
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Android's official code repository has been updated with a fresh load of Donut stuff in the past day or so, and as you might imagine, the dev community is already having a field day with it. Early reports show that all of the features demoed at I/O this year have made it into this cut in one form or another, including universal search, text-to-speech, and gesture support, allowing users to draw symbols on the screen to trigger actions. What's more, though, the codebase is showing signs of CDMA support -- a must for Sprint and Verizon, of course, both of whom will almost certainly have Android sets at one point or another -- and a cool 5-in-1 bank of toggle switches in a home screen widget that can be used to control common features like Bluetooth and WiFi.
Perhaps more excitingly, the community is hard at work on a couple major fronts here: first off, the Donut build is actively being ported to current handsets, and an Android Dev Phone 1 / T-Mobile G1 version is already available (though very, very crashy and incomplete right now). Secondly, work is being conducted to extract major elements of Donut (some of the new widgets, for example) and roll them into cooked 1.5 builds, making the best stuff available in a more solid, accessible form without having to wait for 2.0 to become stable. If you're an adventurous -- nay, borderline mental -- G1 owner, though, you can start your journey to Donut right now.
[Thanks, Yoav R.]
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Filed under: Cellphones, Handhelds
Early Android 2.0 "Donut" build available, up and running on G1 originally appeared on Engadget on Sun, 26 Jul 2009 01:51:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
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Last month news broke that a team of computer scientists had finally managed to improve Netflix’s recommendation algorithm by 10%, making them eligible to win the $1 million Netflix Prize, a competition that began back in 2006. The team, BellKor’s Pragmatic Chaos, is composed of two former leaders in the competition who banded together in attempt to finally break the the 10% barrier and managed to succeed with a score of 10.08%. However, their announcement kicked off a 30 day window where other teams were invited to make their final submissions and potentially take the prize. Tonight, with just one day remaining, a team called The Ensemble has managed to overtake BellKor with a score of 10.09% — an improvement of .01% over the former leaders. You can see the full leaderboard here.
According to its homepage, the Ensemble is made up of three teams who chose to join forces: “Grand Prize Team”, “Opera Solutions”, and “Vandelay United”. The Ensemble has just posted the following blog post to its official site:
We are happy today to have made a submission which surpasses Netflix’s 10% Grand Prize target. The Ensemble is the second team to do this in less than a month. We are very proud of our achievements, and those of our top competitor, Bellkor’s Pragmatic Chaos.
The competition will end tomorrow morning, so teams still have a little bit of time left to make their last-second submissions, but things are looking good for The Ensemble. This has to be absolutely brutal for team BellKor.
Thanks to TechCrunch intern Dan Romero for the tip.
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